Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better.
^_^ <3 ^_^
Richard might be able to say “I know people won’t hate me for speaking, but for some reason I can’t make myself speak”, whereas I’ve never heard someone say “I know climate change is real, but for some reason I can’t make myself vote to prevent it.” I’m not sure how seriously to take this discrepancy.
I haven’t heard this either, but I have heard (and experienced) “I know that eating meat is wrong, but for some reason I can’t make myself become a vegetarian”. Jonathan Haidt uses this as an example of an emotional-rational valley in The Happiness Hypothesis:
During my first year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I discovered the weakness of moral reasoning in myself. I read a wonderful book—Practical Ethics—by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. Singer, a humane consequentialist, shows how we can apply a consistent concern for the welfare of others to resolve many ethical problems of daily life. Singer’s approach to the ethics of killing animals changed forever my thinking about my food choices. Singer proposes and justifies a few guiding principles: First, it is wrong to cause pain and suffering to any sentient creature, therefore current factory farming methods are unethical. Second, it is wrong to take the life of a sentient being that has some sense of identity and attachments, therefore killing animals with large brains and highly developed social lives (such as other primates and most other mammals ) is wrong, even if they could be raised in an environment they enjoyed and were then killed painlessly. Singer’s clear and compelling arguments convinced me on the spot, and since that day I have been morally opposed to all forms of factory farming. Morally opposed, but not behaviorally opposed. I love the tast e of meat, and the only thing that changed in the first six months after reading Singer is that I thought about my hypocrisy each time I ordered a hamburger.
But then, during my second year of graduate school, I began to study the emotion of disgust, and I worked with Paul Rozin, one of the foremost authorities on the psychology of eating. Rozin and I were trying to find video clips to elicit disgust in the experiments we were planning, and we met one morning with a research assistant who showed us some videos he had found. One of them was Faces of Death, a compilation of real and fake video footage of people being killed. (These scenes were so disturbing that we could not ethically use them.) Along with the videotaped suicides and executions, there was a long sequence shot inside a slaughterhouse. I watched in horror as cows, moving down a dripping disassembly line, were bludgeoned, hooked, and sliced up. Afterwards, Rozin and I went to lunch to talk about the project. We both ordered vegetarian meals. For days afterwards, the sight of red meat made me queasy. My visceral feelings now matched the beliefs Singer had given me. The elephant now agreed with the rider, and I became a vegetarian. For about three weeks. Gradually, as the disgust faded, fish and chicken reentered my diet. Then red meat did, too, although even now, eighteen years later, I still eat less red meat and choose nonfactory-farmed meats when they are available.
That experience taught me an important lesson. I think of myself as a fairly rational person. I found Singer’s arguments persuasive. But, to paraphrase Medea’s lament (from chapter 1): I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.
I expect it’s common for people to say (or at least be in a position to say truly, if they chose) “I know that climate change is real, but for some reason I can’t persuade myself not to vote Republican”. In some cases that will be because they like the Republicans’ other policies, in which case there isn’t necessarily an actual “valley” here. But party loyalty is a thing, and I guarantee there are people who could truly say “I know that Party X’s actual policies are a better match for my values, but I can’t bring myself to vote for them rather than for Party Y”.
(As a relatively-unimportant side-note, I’d like to add that sometimes it’s not so much a matter of party loyalty as it is party spite. For example, “Party X’s actual policies are a better match for my values, but I despise the groupthink-enforcing anti-intellectual cultural forces associated with their local supremacyso much that I’m going to vote for Party Y, not because Party Y would actually be any better on the free-speech/pro-intellectualism front if they took power, but because I feel better supporting the currently-losing side of an Evil vs. Evil conflict.”)
^_^ <3 ^_^
I haven’t heard this either, but I have heard (and experienced) “I know that eating meat is wrong, but for some reason I can’t make myself become a vegetarian”. Jonathan Haidt uses this as an example of an emotional-rational valley in The Happiness Hypothesis:
I expect it’s common for people to say (or at least be in a position to say truly, if they chose) “I know that climate change is real, but for some reason I can’t persuade myself not to vote Republican”. In some cases that will be because they like the Republicans’ other policies, in which case there isn’t necessarily an actual “valley” here. But party loyalty is a thing, and I guarantee there are people who could truly say “I know that Party X’s actual policies are a better match for my values, but I can’t bring myself to vote for them rather than for Party Y”.
(As a relatively-unimportant side-note, I’d like to add that sometimes it’s not so much a matter of party loyalty as it is party spite. For example, “Party X’s actual policies are a better match for my values, but I despise the groupthink-enforcing anti-intellectual cultural forces associated with their local supremacy so much that I’m going to vote for Party Y, not because Party Y would actually be any better on the free-speech/pro-intellectualism front if they took power, but because I feel better supporting the currently-losing side of an Evil vs. Evil conflict.”)